After years of unsuccessfully trying to advertise my services as a freelance software developer with a website that didn’t land me a single new client and only created costs, which I came to neglect more and more, because I was unhappy maintaining it… I have decided to switch gears and make things more personal.

So this is now my personal website. I will use this site as a creative outlet, and share various things that I hold dear. I look forward to running this site, I think it will be a lot of fun.

In the state of today’s internet, we need personal homepages more than ever. There was a lot of potential in the early days of the internet, and much of this potential has not been tapped into, even to this day. A free and open cyberspace… where each individual could craft their own unique identity, and lay claim to their very own personal webspace, maintaining it as they please… this was envisioned in the early internet.

Instead of that, vast regions of cyberspace have been taken over by large corporations, who redistribute it to the common folk in the form of social media platforms and the like. Because there is a certain barrier to entry in the internet (maintaining a web server is not common knowledge – unfortunately!), the average individual has no choice but to accept the prepackaged little plot of cyberspace that is sold back to them when they download Instagram or Twitter from the Play Store (though the download is free, users pay by means of the blatant surveillance to which they are subjected).

The companies running these platforms dictate who they deem acceptable, and who gets censored. Those who have been silenced for expressing their thoughts, if they are not somewhat tech-savvy, could be essentially excluded from the internet entirely – so much so, that human rights discussions around social media bans have surfaced. Is the use of Twitter a human right? I actually disagree. The company can decide for itself, to whom it sells its product. The problem is that we have created a society, in which the average person has been tricked into thinking that they must buy the product in the first place, in order to participate in discussion. Publishing your thoughts on some kind of publicly reachable web server; that is a human right.

Furthermore, social media platforms have changed how we think and behave, in a deep-rooted and unhealthy way. A personal online presence, whether a homepage or a social media profile, is something that ought to be maintained and taken care of. Similar to a garden or a shrine, in which we must make the effort to trim the weeds and sweep the floor, simply to maintain the energy of cleanliness and order, so too, must a website be maintained. A social media platform, on the other hand, is a mass produced commodity, funded by advertising and surveillance, sold to the user, fueling the narcissistic trait, that we have come to know as social media addiction.

For this reason, and probably other reasons as well, I have decided to start this web site. By the way, all this thinking about how the internet used to be, and how it ought to be, has made me very nostalgic for the old “Web 1.0”. For this reason, I built a small Web 1.0 inspired WordPress theme, with the goal of creating the look and feel of a website from the early internet, which this site is currently powered by. If you are also running a website, and feel like I do, or even if you don’t – feel free to use it for your site: https://github.com/saint-hilaire/web1-0-wp-theme